1941: The Year That Keeps Returning Hardcover - 2013

Media reviews

"A chilling personal account of the deep-seated terror and ethnic violence underpinning the pub bet stage of Croatia during World War II… A stunning work that looks frankly at the ‘roots of evil'.”  —Kirkus Reviews

"In this ambitious mix of history and memoir, Goldstein, a Croatian writer, looks back at WWII and its effects on his life, family, and neighbors….Goldstein covers a lot of territory as he explores the vicious ethnic warfare between Serbs and Croats from 1941 onward and looks at how the Nazi pogrom further affected his country’s Jewish community….It’s a poignant, uncompromising recollection, told in a meandering but easy-to-follow manner…. Goldstein’s book, reconstructed through personal experience as well as numerous interviews and historical documents provides invaluable insight into Croatia during WWII." —Publishers Weekly

“I came across this remarkable book, which has not yet been translated into English, while writing recently about the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It deserves attention because it explains, perhaps better than any book I know of, how different ethnic groups, who lived side by side in peace for centuries, were made to turn against one another and become each other’s executioners in that unhappy country.” —Charles Simic
 
“Here at last is a memoir whose author readily admits that his childhood recollections are not necessarily crystal clear, but who has made up for the inevitable obscurities with assiduous research and thorough interviews so as to rank it among the greatest writings on the witches’ cauldron that was Hitler’s Europe in 1941. The focus is on Croatia where, under the command of the satanic Ustasha fascists, neighbors denounced, robbed, and killed neighbors, but Slavko Goldstein’s 1941 could be applied to every country where war and foreign occupation turned hitherto harmless people into bandits.” —István Deák, Seth Low Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University

“Goldstein, 63, keeps up a formidable pace. Besides editing Erasmus and directing its parent research institute, the Erasmus Guild, he heads an independent publishing house, sits on the council of the Zagreb Jewish Community, and appears frequently on local television and radio programs. In a sense, Goldstein’s activism dates back to 1941, the year the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia and installed a puppet regime, the Ustasha, to run Croatia for them.” —The Jerusalem Report
 
“Goldstein’s book is at once autobiography and family chronicle, a testimonial and a historical record, a work of literature. Simply, lucidly, it recounts the private life of a family and the public life of a city, the reign of the Independent State of Croatia and World War II, the suffering and the camps, and the postwar tragedies that mirror the past.” —Zarez (Croatia)
 
“Based on personal memories and historical research, Goldstein has spun—as if from coils of yarn of good and evil—a singular history of twentieth-century tragedies.” —Novi List (Croatia)
 
“A monumental work.” —Slobodna Dalmacija (Croatia)